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ISSN 1549–4497 (online) ISSN 1549–4470 (print) ISSN 1549–4489 (CD-ROM)Aestimatio 2 (2005) 141--161

Lucretius on Creation and Evolution:A Commentary on De rerumnatura 5.772--1104 by Gordon Campbell

Oxford/New York:Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+385. ISBN0--19--926396--5. Cloth $114.80

Reviewed byBrooke Holmes

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hillbaholmes@email.unc.edu

If survival of the fittest is a principle as relevant to ideas as it is tospecies, Darwinism has proved to be a hardy breed, especially if wejudge provocation to be a sign of life. Last November alone, votersin Pennsylvania ousted school board members who had instated poli-cies that gave Intelligent Design a hearing alongside Darwin in ninth-grade biology, while the Kansas Board of Education removed obsta-cles to teaching both perspectives. The Austrian Cardinal ChristophSchoenborn felt obliged to go on the record once again about theChurch’s views on the debate over evolution in America. And an am-bitious exhibition simply entitled ‘Darwin’ opened at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York. One reviewer [Rothstein2005], citing an 1844 letter in which Darwin says that writing abouthis ideas was ‘like confessing a murder’, takes the curator to task fordomesticating a ‘bizarre’ and ‘shocking’ idea. What is so unnervingabout Darwinism? The Cardinal is blunt: ‘It’s all about materialism,that’s the key issue’ [Heneghan 2005]. It is the idea that matter isthe only reality.

Epicureanism is Antiquity’s most infamous promoter of mate-rialism, as well as the attendant horrors outlined by the KansanBoard—secular humanism, atheism, and the idea that life is acciden-tal, both in the everyday and in its genesis.1 Nowhere, perhaps, isthe defense of these tenets more vivid and calculated than in the fifthbook of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, in which our gaze is shifted fromthe primordia rerum, the imperishable first-beginnings of things, to

Of course, strictly speaking, the Epicureans are not atheists; but their gods1

inhabit another world and care not a whit for humankind, which is to saythat their brand of humanism is aggressively secular.

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the contingent origins of our mortal cosmos and the organisms thatinhabit it. Lucretius has an axe to grind in this book with Anti-quity’s teleologists—the Platonists, the Aristotelians, and, most ofall, the Stoics. His stated aim is to disabuse his reader of the ideathat the nature of the universe is owed to any demiurgic blueprint.From the outset, the most visible cost of this disenchantment—whichfor Lucretius, of course, is its greatest gain—is the uncoupling of thehuman from any cosmic master plan. The critique of teleology is,then, at its heart, a critique of the idea that the world was createdhominum causa, for the sake of people: cosmology for Epicurus andhis followers always entails a payoff for ethics.

Human exceptionalism is, in fact, recast as the particular hostil-ity of the earth towards these creatures. This is best represented bythe helplessness of the human infant, which is contrasted to the easewith which the other animals are at home in the world. Of course,birth trauma also matters to a teleologist like Plato. But whereas theTimaeus sees education as a realignment of our true nature with thedivine order of the universe, in Epicureanism, human development isa history of creating defenses, good and bad, of which philosophy isthe most noble and effective. This phylogenesis is then restaged, atleast in part, as ontogenesis. The second half of book 5 of De rer. nat.takes up the task of accounting for human nature in a cosmos shorton divine solicitude and partial to all the other animals, by investi-gating how anthropogony parts ways with zoogony under the force ofcircumstances. That is, it sets out to explain how the human (scil. us)is produced in time through the interaction of organism and environ-ment, rather than to describe the pet project of a benevolent creator.

Lucretius’ is a complex story in book 5: he tries to explain thespontaneous generation of life, speculates about human prehistory,gives a description of early communities that includes laconic expla-nations of the origins of justice and language, and traces the develop-ment of cities and civilization. For years, the mixture of apparentlydystopic and utopic elements at both the early and the late stagesof this story puzzled scholars, who split on whether Lucretius was a‘Primitivist’ or a ‘Progressivist,’ i.e., whether he idealized the pastor the present. The past few decades, however, have seen an increas-ing dissatisfaction with this either/or opposition and an attempt to

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engage more carefully with the text and its competing movements.2This trend has opened up a space for a new set of questions for read-ers of book 5: What constitutes the distance between humans andother creatures—viable life forms and monsters? What is the rela-tionship between human vulnerability and the pursuit of ars? Whatis the role of necessity in producing the human, and where or whendoes it give way to a form of self-fashioning? What ensures the sur-vival of humans in a quasi-Darwinian world of species competition?How do the stories that Lucretius tells about the spontaneous originsof life or human exceptionalism relate to our own dominant, albeithotly contested, evolutionary narrative?

Lucretius on Creation and Evolution, Gordon Campbell’s newcommentary on some of the most interesting lines in Lucretius’ story(5.772--1104), stakes out the ground of some of these issues. Camp-bell has written a thoughtful and timely reassessment of Lucretius’ en-gagement with his teleological opponents, as well as with Presocraticzoogony—good use is made of the recently published Strasbourg frag-ments of Empedocles—Golden Age myths, and, of course, the elusivemaster text of Epicurus himself. Yet, if all roads lead to Lucretius,they approach him both from the periods prior to the poem and fromour own recent, and sometimes very recent past. Lucretius’ poem wasone of the most prominent explanations of the creation of life in mech-anistic and non-teleological terms from the early Renaissance untilthe publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859, and Darwin’stheories bear some striking similarities to those found in the ancienttradition of thinking about the beginnings of life. Besides pursuingits natural task of Quellenforschung, then, Campbell’s commentarywagers that De rer. nat. 5 intersects with our present set of questionsand anxieties about evolution in interesting ways, and sets out tomap these points of intersection. ‘Map’ may be the wrong word here,however, since it is in his joining of past and present that Campbellis at his most creative.

In fact, it would have been helpful if a better map of Camp-bell’s own work had been made available to the reader. No attemptis made in the introduction to integrate the lines chosen into thepoem as a whole or book 5. Ready familiarity with more general

E.g., recently, Blickman 1989, Nussbaum 1994, Asmis 1996, and Holmes2

2005.

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questions of background and context for the poem is assumed, as isa strong grounding in Epicureanism. Most of the Greek is translated,while, unsurprisingly, the Latin is not, although Campbell offers, inaddition to the Latin text, a lucid translation of his excerpt.3 Still,a reader working in translation on key topics, such as the originsof language or failed species, could glean much from the series ofsection introductions which form the backbone of the commentaryproper. These range from brief transitioning remarks to condensedversions of working papers that Campbell has published elsewhere[2002a, 2002b]. Campbell has also added two long appendices—a‘Table of Themes in Accounts of Creation, Zoogony, and Anthro-pogony’ and a ‘Table of Themes in Prehistories and Accounts of theGolden Age’ (including Isles of the Blessed, Ideal States, Noble Sav-ages, and so forth)—which, while not exhaustive, offer a wealth ofdata. The index itself is unfortunately short and rather arbitrary.But despite limitations on the text’s accessibility to non-specialists,both students of Epicureanism and those interested in the history ofthinking about the origins of life and the human in the Western tra-dition now have a stimulating guide to what is fascinating, if difficult,Lucretian terrain.

The luxury of painstaking attention to the text is the great joyof a commentary. Such attentiveness in a commentary like this one,where it is combined with a deep sensitivity to larger issues, often re-wards. For centuries, scholars have debated the complex relationshipbetween poetry and science in the epic masterpiece of a philosophicaltradition ostensibly hostile to myth and poetry. One of the strengthsof Campbell’s commentary is its deft negotiation of Lucretius’ poeticand philosophical strategies, which allows one to observe the detailsof this dynamic. Lucretius has recourse to atoms and void as ex-planatory mechanisms in book 5 less often than elsewhere in thepoem. This is not to say that we lose sight of the atomic under-pinnings of the visible world, but we do spend more time at themacrophysical level. As a result, book 5 is rich in topoi on the for-mation of life, accounts of the Golden Age, and the development ofhuman civilization, making it an excellent place to observe Lucretius’‘remorseless appropriation and recontextualization’ [138] of his non-Epicurean predecessors in action.

On Campbell’s text, see Volk 2004.3

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Central to Campbell’s treatment of Lucretius’ strategy is his useof Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Memes are described as

the sort of generally accepted background ideas whose originsare untraceable. . . that tend to exist and evolve as if they havea life of their own independent of any writer. [180--181]

Campbell speaks, for example, of the ‘Darwin meme’, later correctedto ‘the pack of memes surrounding Darwinism that make up our Bil-dungsgut of prehistory’ [183]. More commonly, however, memes arenot attached to a proper name. This presumably justifies Campbell’sdecision to introduce them only ad lin. 925--1010, i.e., over halfwaythrough the commentary, rather than in the context of his discussionof the Presocratic background to Lucretius’ zoogony. What appearskey to the definition of a meme, then, is that it is a critically unex-amined concept which travels easily beyond its initial context: thememe ‘survival of the fittest’, whose peregrination in the 19th and20th centuries has been problematic, is an excellent example. Thus,it makes sense that Campbell appropriates memes for his discussionof how Lucretius integrates material from other sources and shapes itto suit his purposes, all the while working, whether actively or moresubtly, to head his reader off from the kinds of incorrect inferencesto which those sources fell prey. Memes, for Dawkins and Campbell,function like viruses against which one may need to be ‘vaccinated’,although they may still be useful.

Campbell sees the Golden Age ‘as an integral part of Lucretius’prehistory, and as the very material out of which he builds it. Cer-tain themes’, he claims, ‘are rationalized and debunked, while othersare allowed to remain untouched and to do their work of vaccinationsimply by their recontextualization in Lucretius’ account’ [184]. Ana-lyzing a descriptive passage on the streams that satisfied the thirst ofearly humans, Campbell argues, for example, that Lucretius appro-priates pastoral poetry in order to advance the principle of ‘culturalgradualism’ against the myth of divine beneficence. He then goeson to suggest that Lucretius also uses this idyllic picture ‘to bothlegitimate and illustrate Epicurean ethics’ [206], by showing that thebody’s necessary and natural needs are easily met in a world still un-contaminated by luxury goods. The utility of an intermediary stageof village life between the erramento ferino (wandering in the wild)and the formation of cities, which is unique to Epicurean prehistory,

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thus becomes clear. For it offers a picture of a simpler time whenEpicurean justice could emerge in rudimentary form, without, for allthat, resorting to a Golden Age: ‘in prehistory we find the Epicureantheory at its most powerful, stripped of the accretions of culture andcivilization, saving the human race itself from extinction’ [254]. Muchof the Golden Age imagery that one does find in the account of spon-taneous generation, when people were born from great wombs rootedto the earth, can be seen as helping Lucretius answer the questionof how these beings survived without mothers or τ�χναι (artes): al-though the image of the Earth as mother, with its overtones of Stoicallegory, has him ‘skating on thin ideological ice’ [60], he needs theEarth to give forth a milk-like juice if these first creatures are tobe nourished. Campbell’s attention to Lucretius’ tendency to stresspositive or negative aspects of early human life according to what heis trying to do at a given moment places him firmly within the trendof moving beyond the Primitivist-Progressivist opposition.

This sensitivity to Lucretius’ strategies extends from Campbell’shandling of broad themes to his comments on single words andphrases. He is alert to how Lucretius manipulates language so asto downplay external agency (e.g., on exclusae, ad 802 [71]), or con-versely, how it slips into a teleological idiom (e.g., on crerint, ad 782[47]). This makes him an ideal reader of Lucretius, that is, someonewhom it is ideal to read with. In this sense, Campbell’s is a moresatisfying commentary than Costa 1984, which covers book 5 in itsentirety. The two commentaries, in fact, work nicely together, sinceCosta attends more to questions of grammar, but is more reticentand conservative vis-à-vis the big issues.

But despite the benefits of working with the text in this format,it is precisely the strength and cohesiveness of Campbell’s interpre-tation that makes one begin to wonder why he chose to prepare acommentary rather than a monograph. Lucretius on Creation andEvolution occasionally feels like one of the hybrid creatures that Lu-cretius describes in the zoogony. It can seem as though an argumentis being carried on in footnotes [see below]. On the other hand, whileindividual lemmata often give rise to wide-ranging and imaginativediscussions, the commentary can begin to resemble a cabinet of cu-riosities. It is at these moments that one especially feels that theformat allows Campbell to accumulate information without properlysorting it out, or simply to wander off. Commentaries, it is true,

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are built through the accretion of comparanda. But sometimes thisparataxis can be confusing, if not misleading, especially given thatLucretius’ dense blend of argumentation and never-innocent illustra-tion requires careful untangling.

Take, for example, Campbell’s treatment of Lucretius’ denialof the existence of Centaurs. Lucretius moves from the argumentthat men and horses age differently to pointing out that they nei-ther ‘burn with the same passion of Venus, nor come together with asingle lifestyle, nor find the same things pleasant for the bodies’ [Derer. nat. 897--898, Campbell’s translation]. This last claim opens ontothe observation that hemlock is great for goats, poisonous to humans.Lucretius is building on the theory of perception outlined in book 4whereby different bodies have different pores that determine whatthey experience as painful or pleasurable. In his notes on this [154],Campbell responds to this shift from sexual desire to food with an ex-cursus on the association between food and sex in Lucretius, which heclaims is underwritten by Greek biological thinking on human seed.

Now it is perfectly true, as Campbell explains, that Aristotle andprobably earlier Presocratic writers understood seed as a residue ofconcocted food, and that elsewhere Lucretius directly relates dietto the quality of seed [De rer. nat. 4.1260ff]. Yet this has little rel-evance here, where Lucretius’ easy transition from sexual desire tofood hinges on the word iucunda (pleasures). As Campbell pointsout ad 897, Lucretius thinks that seed is stimulated through seeing,and that the only catalytic objects of vision are members of one’sown species. In a similar way, certain species gain pleasure from cer-tain foods, although it should be said that those whose bodies areincompatible with the food in question may be harmed by it, whereasthe seed of a person looking at Black Beauty is presumably simplyindifferent to equine loveliness. It is not that Campbell is wrongabout ancient ideas about the role of food in the production of seed.But his digression on this topic obscures what really matters here,namely, the Epicurean lock-and-key perception theories that can ex-plain both species-specific desire and some species’ pleasure in foodsthat are poison for other species. As it stands, the notes on food andseed seem better suited to the material on diet and seed in book 4,or, even better, to the discussion of food (pabula) on page117, where,in fact, they would have been quite helpful. It is not that valuableinformation is missing: the relevant comments on seed—that there

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is no viable means of reproduction without visual stimulation—aremade ad 897, while the explanation of the lock-and-key theory ofperception is available ad 899--900. It is simply that there is so muchunorganized information that the notes no longer clarify Lucretius’argument. I should say that Campbell’s notes are chock-full of inter-esting information, and that they are occasionally very funny. Indeed,one is often content just to wander with him. It is simply that attimes the line between erramento and error seems a bit too fine.

While, in principle, Campbell is looking backwards and forwardsequally, from Lucretius’ predecessors to his Nachlëben and our ownconceptual habits, in practice, the fact that these habits are shapedby modern evolutionary biology means that they have a special claimto truth. As a result, the motivation for introducing modern evidenceis often ambiguous. Here again one feels that the commentary formatis problematic in that it allows Campbell to remain less than forth-coming about his own agenda, especially vis-à-vis Lucretius’ anthro-pology. Campbell reasonably argues that clarifying our own, heavilyDarwinian ideas about what an anti-teleological story of the creationof the animate world should look like enables us to understand bet-ter the specific mechanisms of Lucretius’ system. Lucretius, for ex-ample, does not accept mutation at the genetic level and seems toaccommodate the inheritance of acquired characteristics, at least inhumans [7--8]. At the same time, Lucretius’ difference from Darwinsometimes seems presented in such a way as to make him seem morecutting-edge: his view of species as fixed and bounded entities, for ex-ample, allies him with post-Darwinian notions of species stasis [124--125]. In such a context, the use of modern parallels appears to beless about crystallizing our own preconceptions and more about vin-dicating Lucretius. On page 221, for example, Neolithic archeology isenlisted as support for Lucretius’ picture of moderate violence amongearly humans over and against Moschion’s more lurid account of can-nibalism. Ancient bones again work to bolster Campbell’s reading ofthe role of cooperation in human evolution [280--281] (‘L. is quite cor-rect to place pity for the weak in prehistory’), although it should per-haps be noted that the solidity of the bones cannot be extended to theinferences drawn from them that are used to prove Lucretius correct.Different things appear to be at stake in different comparisons under-taken either casually or at some length in the commentary, without

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these stakes always being made clear. Moreover, the interest in show-ing that Lucretius anticipated the work of modern science can dullCampbell’s often incisive readings of the dense nodes of myth, Epi-curean philosophy and rhetoric that are so characteristic of book 5.

In the second half of this review, I want to take a look at themost ambitious part of Campbell’s interpretation of Lucretius’ evo-lutionary narrative. Campbell argues that Lucretius’ claims thathumans are the only species to have evolved; that they evolved intocooperative beings; and that, in doing so, they ensured the survivalof the species and the definitive break between the human and theanimal. How does this work?

Lucretius’ account at 5.1011--1027 of the ‘softening’ of humannature and the formation of the first communities is notoriously el-liptical. In recent years, much attention has been paid to how his ap-parent citation of the principle of Epicurean justice—neither to harmnor be harmed (nec laedere nec violari)—participates in the story be-ing told here. Campbell sees the entire passage as a turning point inthe evolution of the species: whatever changes human nature under-goes here are, henceforth, passed down as inherited characteristics,making Lucretius a Lamarckian. Yet, in part because Campbell’sargument is carried on disjointedly across lemmata, it is unclear howthe external environment provokes these changes to human natureand what these changes are. Some of this vagueness is due to Lu-cretius himself. At 5.1011, without obvious motivation, Lucretiusintroduces a new stage of human development in which humans havehouses, clothing, fire, and nuclear families. From this point on, theybegin to soften (mollescere). Spending time indoors, their bodies canno longer bear exposure to the elements. Venus has a hand in thissoftening, and children break the arrogant natures of their parentswith their ‘winning ways’. Somehow this process creates the condi-tions for humans to establish pacts with one another neither to harmnor to be harmed, and to set up the principle of pitying the weak,which Campbell calls altruism. It is this ‘somehow’, of course, thatmatters. Also of crucial importance is how we understand what hasbeen gained in this development.

Campbell knows what he wants to show, namely, that ‘instead ofbeing a woolly-minded pipedream, the Epicurean theory is the mostpragmatic and realistic approach to justice’ [281], and that Lucretius

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anticipates post-Darwinian work on the evolutionary benefits of co-operation: ‘our co-operative ability is thus the feature that definesour humanity, and enables us to survive’ [262]. Lucretius’ presen-tation of the Epicurean theory, as Campbell understands it, accordswith recent refinements to the model of the prisoner’s dilemma whichwas first analyzed in an Epicurean context by Nicholas Denyer [1983].The basic form of the prisoner’s dilemma takes two prisoners chargedwith the same offense. Each is offered a deal by the police chief: ifboth cooperate, they each get a year in jail; if one defects by con-fessing and betraying the other, he gets off scot-free, while his coun-terpart (the sucker) receives 10 years.4 Conventional wisdom onceheld that the rational choice would be defection. When the dilemmawas translated into Darwinian terms, it became hard to see how anyform of cooperation could be plausible in the theater of ‘survival ofthe fittest’. As a result, cooperation could only be explained as self-sacrifice for the good of the community. Campbell introduces thechallenges to these assumptions posed by the research of Robert Ax-elrod, who worked with computer models of the prisoner’s dilemmain the 1980s. Axelrod’s research revealed that it is not competitionbut cooperation that proves more advantageous when the game isrepeated. More specifically, a strategy called ‘tit-for-tat’, which al-ways reciprocates the behavior of its opponents—it betrays when be-trayed, cooperates with those who have cooperated with it—emergedas the strongest. Moreover, after some time playing with tit-for-tat,the ‘suckers’ began to thrive and the defectors became nearly extinct.Campbell uses these results to reformulate Denyer’s conclusions: ‘theEpicurean model would achieve the best result both for the individualand for the group, and the individual gives up no direct advantageby sticking to the friendship/non-aggression/mutual aid pacts of theEpicurean theory, but receives a direct personal advantage by doingso’ [258]. This appears a valid application of Axelrod’s work. Incasting early humans’ negotiation of non-aggression pacts (amicitia)in a utilitarian light, Campbell keeps Lucretius firmly in the realm ofEpicureanism, where ‘natural’ action is always motivated by a desireto secure the individual’s pleasure.

Campbell omits a third scenario in which both defect and receive five years4

apiece.

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However, there are two problems with what Campbell does fromhere. First, after applying Axelrod’s work to Epicurean mutual non-aggression pacts, Campbell immediately rephrases his claim thus: ‘itis a powerful individual survival strategy that all should pity theweak’ [258]. He presents such pity as ‘learned behavior’ and givesit pride of place in human evolution: ‘now that the human race hasevolved, they are able to make the conceptual leap from their previ-ous conviction [i.e., aggressive competition was the only survival tech-nique] to “it is fair that all pity the weak”.’ But is this pity the samething as amicitia? What I find troubling about this easy conflationof the two ideas is that the prisoner’s dilemma assumes a communityof equals; the tit-for-tat strategy relies on the opportunity for futureretribution in the case of defection. If it is just a question of theweaker versus the stronger from the outset, game theory seems irrele-vant: we would seem to be in the world of Plato’s Gorgias, where theonly answer to Callicles’ law of the stronger would be the one thatPlato gives, namely, that doing injustice is worse than suffering it.Campbell might claim that in a community which includes defectors,the weak (i.e., the suckers), and tit-for-tat players, altruism (alwayscooperating) still emerges as the second-best strategy. Indeed, heseems to suggest this on pages 277 and 280. But even if a player isprogrammed to cooperate always within the game, the rules of thegame still assume the conditions of total reciprocity, that is, that theweak, at least in theory, have the power, say, to lessen my prisonsentence. In any kind of pragmatic situation, if a player is by defi-nition weaker, the stronger has no reason not to cooperate with hisequals and dominate the weaker.5 Thus, asserting that the principle‘pity the weak’ is strictly utilitarian hardly seems valid. I stress thisbecause, although Campbell acknowledges that ‘there does seem tobe a huge conceptual gap between the pacts “neither to harm nor beharmed” and “it is fair that all pity the weak” ’ [277], he neverthelessgroups amicitia and pity for the weak together as cooperation. To

It is worth pointing out that Axelrod seems only to admit strict altruism5

in cases of kin-relations, where self-sacrifice can be understood in terms ofpropagation of the gene pool [1984, 88--89 and 134--135]. At the same time,he does speculate that it is cooperation within kin groups that leads to theadoption of cooperative strategies outside of kin relationships, a move thatCampbell reproduces [see above].

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classify pity for the weak as cooperation is a bold move, since coop-eration is the human trait that Campbell argues protects the speciesfrom extinction, but it does not appear justified by the argument.

Yet it is clear that there must be some connection between thesoftening of humans, the formation of friendship pacts, and pity forthe weak. The second problem with Campbell’s account is that heis not explicit about how this connection works in Lucretius. Nev-ertheless, with a little work, his reconstruction of Lucretius’ argu-ment can, I think, be discerned. Campbell recognizes that any evo-lutionary change must come from the environment. This means thatthe softening of human nature in response to key aspects of the do-mestic environment—the warmth of the fire, shelter, marriage, andchildcare—enjoys some claim to priority as a cause for all futurechanges. What gives rise to this shift towards domesticity is not ev-ident; Lucretius may be silently assuming that the vulnerability ofhumans to other beasts (or at least some humans to other beasts)could have driven them to extinction, had they not formed familiesand communities. In any case, Campbell argues that it is becausemen become softer in their relationships with their wives and theirchildren that they behave favorably to their neighbors: ‘the amicitiadoes not seem to arise from utility as in Vat. 23 but from a more spon-taneous and more nearly altruistic motive. The results are pragmatic’[273]. Thus, he understands the softening of human nature as lead-ing directly to the gain of reasoning (λογισµÒc): the argument wouldbe that once the benefits of cooperation, initiated not for utilitarianreasons but as a result of the softening of human nature, were seenwithin the family, humans were then moved to forge relationships ofamicitia with their neighbors. This would explain why family life isso important to the account of justice: it generates the conditionsunder which humans learn the benefits of cooperation, whatever wetake these to be—again, Campbell is vague on this point, as well ason how these benefits map onto the benefits of cooperation within theprisoner’s dilemma model. The final stage would be something thatlooked like altruism: the first humans ‘are pictured extrapolatingfrom the lessons they have learned at home, and applying the resultsto the women and children of other families in a positive developmentof the negative nec laedere nec violari’ [277].

In this version of the argument, pity for non-kin weak thus getsa more complex explanation than Campbell puts forth in his original

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continuous version of the argument [see 252--261], where pity is regu-larly just substituted for amicitia. Or rather, it gets two and perhapseven three explanations. On the one hand, Campbell recognizes thedifficulties posed by his earlier inclusion of women and children inthe prisoner’s dilemma: ‘the weak cannot strictly engage in the firstpart of the pact nec laedere (do not harm), and so this transcends thebasic non-aggression pacts’ [277]. His solution is to make the soften-ing of human nature the cause of both the non-aggression pacts andpity for non-kin weak. In other words, pity for non-kin weak bearsno direct connection to the non-aggression pacts, although both havetheir roots in the formation of nuclear families. Such a position makesCampbell ’s vagueness about the ‘lessons. . . learned at home’ all themore troubling, since these lessons can no longer been seen as derivedfrom the utilitarian benefits associated with the non-aggression pacts.

It seems likely that Campbell is close to the Lucretian positionwhen he says that the softening of human nature ‘is not strictly drivenby utility, and the value of such a psychological change becomesclear only later’ [272]. In fact, Campbell has not shown the placeof utility at all at this stage of evolution: the utility associated withhis re-reading of the prisoner’s dilemma only becomes clear whennon-aggression pacts are formed. What this means for his argumentis that, first, some fundamental psychological change unrelated tothe intellectual perception of benefit is the only explanation for thedevelopment of amicitia and any utilitarian justification comes later.It is thus unclear, if ‘the first friendship pacts had to be learnedintellectually’ [278], what experience the first humans are learningfrom. Second, since at this stage of the argument Campbell no longerrelates pity for non-kin weak directly to the non-aggression pacts andthe benefits of cooperation that they reveal, the relationship betweenutilitarianism and altruism falls apart. Pity for non-kin weak may bean extension of intrafamilial cooperation, but we do not know whatthat is. We are left to conclude that pity is an acquired characteristicderived from the softening of human nature that never enters intothe utilitarian calculus.

But on the other hand, Campbell is clearly attached to the ideathat altruism for Lucretius holds an evolutionary advantage and isan important part of the cooperation that saves the species. Havingrecognized that women and children are technically out of place inthe prisoner’s dilemma since they do not have the power to harm,

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he nevertheless reintroduces the prisoner’s dilemma in an attemptto reestablish the utilitarian pedigree of altruism. This return tothe earlier arguments seems to offer an explanation of pity that isincompatible with the one in which altruism and amicitia are paralleldevelopments arising from changes to the psychological makeup ofhuman beings. It may be that Campbell understands both altruismand amicitia as independently revealing their utility over time. Butthen we are back where we started: how can we evaluate the utility ofaltruism if its benefits are not those derived from cooperation withina community of equals? If this utility lies elsewhere, why introducethe prisoner’s dilemma to explain altruism?

There is still a third explanation of pity lurking in Campbell’stext, one that suggests yet again the underlying problems with theutilitarian reading of altruism that he offers. On page 278, Campbellshifts gears and embeds altruism once again in the development ofamicitia, rather than allowing it to develop directly from the nuclearfamily. On this view, pity is the extension of the non-aggressionpacts to unequal power relationships with other men’s women andchildren.6 Here, it is as if having learned the benefits of cooperation inthe quasi-political sphere, men no longer want to exploit their poweradvantage even when reciprocity is out of the question although, ifdomination is taken to be a good thing in itself, pace Plato, aggressionwould yield more gain than cooperation with the weaker. Campbellgets around the problem of why men stop dominating the weak evenwhen there is no advantage in their restraint by reintroducing thetheory of acquired characteristics. Cooperation is thus ‘learned be-havior’ which is ‘passed down to offspring as an instinctive responseto women and children’ [278]. That Campbell offers this interpreta-tion would seem to be a tacit acknowledgement that it is difficult toconstrue pity for the weak in utilitarian terms, or at least utilitari-anism as it appears within game theory. One also wonders whetherpity is the result of a characteristic acquired during the process ofdomestication or if it comes after the development of amicitia. Mostimportantly, while the position that pity for non-kin weak is an ‘in-stinctive response’ solves the problem of fitting altruism into theprisoner’s dilemma model, it moves decisively away from Lucretius’

This is sometimes called the ‘associationist’ argument, which is treated at6

length in the context of Epicurean friendship by Philip Mitsis [1988].

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text, where amicitia and what Campbell calls altruism are closelylinked. As a result, altruism disappears from the species-saving co-operation that Campbell thinks is so important to Lucretius’ conceptof the human.

Campbell’s overall argument has its merits, and one wishes ithad been laid out more systematically at some point. His practice ofreferring the question of pity for the weak to Axelrod’s work on theprisoner’s dilemma seems to reflect his own desire to make Lucretius’definition of the human conform to what one suspects is his own.Unfortunately, his use of game theory distracts him from the textitself. It would seem that Lucretius is telling two stories in these lines.One certainly has to do with justice. Equally important, however, isthe fixation on children, which cannot be fully explained by stayingwithin the parameters of the debate about justice. As Campbellhimself observes, when Lucretius talks about pity for the weak, he‘deliberately go[es] beyond what Epicurus would consider allowablein giving only one possible cause of justice’ [276]. Excessive, too,is 5.1027, a verse on which Campbell is uncharacteristically silent.Lucretius asserts that the human race would have been destroyedwithout concordia, then adds that ‘nor would the offspring have beenable to prolong the race to this day.’

Another oddity is the expression ‘muliebreque saeclum’ (‘femalerace’) at 5.1021, found nowhere else in Latin literature. Campbellinsists that Lucretius does not see women as a separate race or species.He relates ‘muliebreque saeclum’ to similar phrases (e.g., ‘muliebresecus’) in other authors, although ad 853 he has a long note on‘saeclum’ where it, with ‘genus’, is clearly Lucretius’ word for species,whether human or animal [e.g., 5.791, 1169, 1238]. And ‘muliebregenus’ is found at 5.1355, in a discussion of the first forms of clothing.Lucretius tells us there that Natura forced men to weave first, sincethe genus virile excelled in ars and was far more clever than therace of women. Not a separate species, then, but also, perhaps, notentirely at home in the genus humanum. One begins to wonderwhether all the talk of human nature in both Lucretius and Campbellforgets a difference embedded in the text that needs to be acknow-ledged if these lines are to seem less opaque.

My own suspicion is that there is a bit of a conceptual lacunain the erramento ferino, which exerts pressure on this subsequent

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phase. Lucretius goes to great pains, as we have seen, to accountfor how the first humans survived by positing a surreally maternalearth. But this earth becomes hard and brutal after the early daysof spontaneous generation. We know too that care of the young is apressing object of concern for Lucretius: as I noted above, earlier inbook 5, he argues against teleological cosmogonies by enumeratingthe earth’s faults, foremost among which is its hostility to the humaninfant cast out from its mother’s womb. So what is going on in theperiod when the earth has turned cruel but families have not yetformed? At 5.1011ff, children re-enter the picture because men andwomen join in marriage. A line is probably lost between 5.1012 and1013, and it might have shed light on the implications of this movetowards the nuclear family. It is intriguing that the manuscripts havecognita sunt—although Campbell accepts Lachmann’s emendation(coniubium) and argues against the lacuna—which anticipates theintellectual act implied by the next words: ‘and they saw the childrencreated from them.’ ‘They’, as Campbell rightly notes, must bethe fathers, an indication that this ‘human’ story is, in fact, beingtold from the perspective of one sex, whose acquisition of reasonmay rely more on the inference of paternity than on the perceptionof any intrafamilial cooperation. For I think Campbell is right tounderstand the verb ‘to see’ (videre) to mean that the fathers realizethat the children are their own, that is, that they are created ex se(from themselves). This recognition, combined with fire and love,prepares the way for amicitia and pity for the weak. But how?

In recent years, it has been argued [see van der Waerdt 1988]that later Epicureans modified Epicurus’ denial that there could beany natural affection between humans—even between children andparents7 —by adopting some version of the Stoic concept of ο�κε�ωσιc,which Long and Sedley [1987 I.351] translate as ‘affectionate owner-ship’. Campbell accepts these arguments in order to make ο�κε�ωσιca factor in the development of pity for non-kin weak [277--278] inthe third explanation which I sketched above. Yet it would makemore sense to locate ο�κε�ωσιc at the moment when fathers recognizetheir children as their own and take on wives, especially since Stoic

Epicurus advised the sage to stay single, marriage being full of ‘inconve-7

niences’.

157 Aestimatio

ο�κε�ωσιc begins with, in addition to a desire for self-preservation,love of offspring.

If we understand the protection of wives and children as nowimplicated in the well-being of the autonomous male individual [cf.Homer, Od. 9.114--115], we can see that pity for the weak may fallunder the logic of a mutual non-aggression pact without being sim-ply a knee-jerk extension of it or a parallel development. It is notcompletely clear whether the weak are threatened by wild beasts orother humans (already in the erramento ferino, sex is marked by ei-ther mutual desire or male violence, and perhaps by the idea, too,that women need to trade sex for food), or by both. If it is otherhumans that are the problem, men may entrust (commendarunt)women and children, presumably to one another, in these pacts onthe basis of a shared vulnerability—I will not harm your family ifyou will not harm mine—thus restoring the conditions of reciprocityand the promise of retribution required by game theory. This mayexplain Lucretius’ emphasis on the importance of man-to-man com-munication in the passage on altruism (‘signing with cries and haltinggestures that it is right for all to pity the weak’). But if we at least en-tertain the possibility that the danger lies with wild beasts, pity thenencompassing a commitment to the protection of wives and childrenfrom these beasts, we might get a sense of why Lucretius’ conclusionto this passage is so apocalyptic.

If Lucretius so readily groups the female race with children as im-becilli (the weak and the helpless), it is not just a question of how this‘race’ ever survived, but how children managed to. For, presumably,women were solely responsible for childcare before. Acknowledgingthis tension between the need to offer protection to women in thefirst communities and the earlier assumption of gender-neutral self-sufficiency sheds some light on 5.1027, then, where the worry is notonly that the human race will be wiped out, but that the offspringwill not be able to lead the species (saecla) into the future: to re-produce, they have to survive their traumatic and vulnerable earlyyears. There may be a sense here that in such a hostile world, womenand children need men, that the future of the species required fathersonce Natura herself turned cruel.

The Garden, Epicurus’ philosophical school, was revolutionaryin its acceptance of women, and Epicureanism may, as a philosophi-cal system, leave more room for ‘feminine principals’, as Campbell’s

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mentor, the late Don Fowler [1996], has argued.8 Campbell suggeststhat the very process of softening may be taken as the ‘feminization’of the human race. But this only reminds us that what matters hereis the evolution of men [see 267--268 ad 5.1014], whose softening cre-ates the impetus for ars, undertaken on both their own behalf andthat of a genus that is far less clever. Lucretius, it is clear, excludesthe saeclum muliebre from justice and the political at the origins ofthese institutions, and, as I have suggested, inscribes the male pro-tection of women and the paternal oversight of the family line intothe order of necessity. This order of necessity becomes, for Camp-bell, the very conditions under which the ‘human’ emerges as such.At the very least, it is worth observing that when Campbell talksabout the need for humans to learn cooperation to survive, he, likeLucretius, is talking about a community of men. Thus, the awarenessof difference within the genus humanum is not just some politicallycorrect orthodoxy. Nor does it mean that we have to reinstate abinary opposition, this time between Lucretius the misogynist andLucretius the feminist; for like Primitivism and Progressivism, theseterms conceal more than they reveal. Rather, it is a question ofmarking complications that seem to disrupt the text itself. In mim-icking Lucretius’ own conflation of human nature and male natureby reducing everything here to the prisoner’s dilemma and equatingpolitical cooperation with what is human, Campbell’s reading fallsshort of full engagement with a complex text.

In short, I rather like the idea that Lucretius could have submit-ted the winning entry in Axelrod’s first iterated prisoner’s dilemmacompetition. My concern is that if we focus on whether Lucretius’idea of human nature, and particularly that which makes us human,is validated by modern views of utilitarianism in an evolutionary con-text, we may miss how his story is implicated in the dynamics of thepoem and its assumptions, something to which Campbell is sensitiveat other points. Moreover, such a strategy fails to recognize thateven if the conclusions of modern science and Lucretius coincide, itstill matters how they arrived at those conclusions: surface similari-ties betray fundamental differences in the production of knowledge.

While Campbell’s citations are often extensive, in noting Fowler on the8

‘feminine principal’, he fails to cite the article that sparked it, Nugent 1994,which presents a less positive picture of gender in Lucretius.

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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Campbell seems to take theevidence of science—evolutionary biology, game theory, prehistoricarchaeology—as the gold standard for determining what it is thatmakes us human, that is, where it is that Lucretius gets it right. Iwant to stress that I find Campbell’s revision of Denyer’s account ofEpicurean justice in many ways persuasive. It has changed my under-standing of this passage and challenged me to rethink it; I have nodoubt it will stimulate further discussion of these lines. Thus, it mayseem perverse to want to restore sexual disequilibrium or a politicsof dominance to a reading of Lucretian prehistory that celebratesthe social utility of cooperation and the ethics of altruism. But it isprecisely the use of modern sources to legitimate Lucretius’ human-ism (and, perhaps, vice versa) that makes a reading which recognizesthe specificity of the saeclum muliebre end up looking like supportfor a socio-biological theory of sex roles and, more insidiously, likean endorsement of such a theory as a blueprint for defining the hu-man. That is, the reading which I have adumbrated starts lookingstrangely prescriptive. And so, it is not just that I think that Camp-bell’s fidelity to game theory sets an unnecessary limitation on hisinterpretation of these lines. I also find the resulting naturalizationof Lucretius’ story troubling.

Lucretius on Creation and Evolution offers a bold and sophisti-cated attempt to come to terms with Lucretius’ arguments on evo-lution in the spirit of the poem’s most ambitious commentators. Itdeserves not only consultation but active perusal. I could not agreemore with Campbell’s commitment to putting Lucretius and Epicure-anism into conversation with the present and with our own attemptsto figure out where humans belong in a world of chance and imper-sonal necessity. But reading book 5, it seems to me, is an exercise intracing the contingency of anthropologies and anthropogonies. Wecan locate its contemporary salience in the interaction visible withinit between materialism and the stories which Lucretius tells of whatnature ‘forces’ [e.g., 5.1028, 1354] us to be or become, and in Lu-cretius’ interpretation of the imperatives which he believes he findsinscribed into us. As Benjamin writes, ‘It is true that men (Men-schen) as a species completed their evolution thousands of years ago;but mankind (Menschheit) as a species is just beginning his’ [1996,

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I.487].9 In this chronology, the equation of mankind and humankindremains the least evolved thing of all.10

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